Any suggestions on what may be the best personal firewall to protect a home pc set up on cablemodem?
Thanks
Taxibob

Checkout ZoneAlarm from http://www.zonelabs.com

Can't go wrong with Citydude's suggestion for zone alarm. Plus it's free!

I repeating this post from another part of the board due to its importance !

On getting caught on the internet; They can and will find you if they want to. Anybody who knows the basics of networks can tell you that they can trace you to a specific machine.
If you really must post something (or do something) very dangerous on the internet, consider going to an internet cafe in a foreign country, getting yet another "Hotmail" or "Juno" e-mail account, and submitting it thusly.
Better yet, don't do the above described stuff.
Life is simpler that way.

Pauncho

thanks guys


Mr. Pauncho
It isn't my plan to do any evil.I only wish to make my computer a harder thing for people to mess with.
Taxibob

Get a hardware solution it is far better than Zone Alarm.

http://www.hawkingtech.com/store/routersdsl.htm

Works great.

We need a firewall because the PC and Windows was never designed to connect to the world. But now the connection is so important that turn-key networking give way to security.

Zone alarm is quite easy to use and free. The only requirement for a home PC firewall is to disable any response when kids try to scan your IP address of your computer. ZA seemed sufficient. But don't try it if the computer is on a private LAN.

I don't think that you even need a hardware router with a firewall on if you have a home network. ZA allows access to the net on an application level. Every computer can therefore be customised.

Senor left out something important, maybe I'll start another thread.

I still got more. If you have cable or DSL for ISP, install zone alarm and you can see that your computer is scanned every 5 min. The ISP's deny these, saying that they are normal activities. This is plain false because after I installed zone alarm to block unwanted internet access, no body complained. If the scanning of my computer isn't necessary by the ISP, how can they say all the scanning of my computer are normal? The computer is mine and I don't want anything to touch it without my approval.

Once I called technical support because the signal dropped to unusable levels. They tried to run some remote trouble shooting software and were very frustrated when they find the firewall. I have to disable it. They made sure that the firewall will be disabled already when they come over, I almost thought they will shoot the computer, point blank, if I do not remember to disable it.

If you think about what guys with sufficient networking experience will want to be a repair men, you will understand that ISP's will not accept that you cannot do without a firewall.

My experience agrees well with the security community. There is no solution to denial of service attacks. Worse is yet to come. Kids download ready made scripts, scan unprotected computers 24/7, remember it or plant something there, made the computer to send out garbage service requests at the same time some point in the future. It's a gangster's world, the bigger the turf (no. of computers), the bigger the ego they have. They take down websites whenever they like to boost their ego.

You are probably OK with dial-ups such as AOL. You don't have a fixed IP address. You are vulnerable only when you are connected. Since if you use AOL, every application using the internet will be AOL's, it is fairly easy to block any other applications accessing the internet.

By the way, don't use DSL since it got a little bit more problems than cable. I asure you that you don't want ANY problem. No way you can find a decent person for technical support. The way to go is to give you a moron first, if the problem cannot be solved in an hour, then a lesser moron will come to the rescue. If the problem cannot be solved in a week, then a lesser lesser moron will come, until... Everybody goes by moronic procedures, assuming that morons are talking to morons. It's takes an hour to change from static to dynamic address. Sit in front of the computer, look at the screen, is it on?, at the left hand corner, click start ... When in doubt, they start all over again, even I am already sitting in front of the computer.

Windows XP will have built in firewall software when it comes out in October.

I am currently running the Windows XP Professional -180 day preview. The firewall does a good job of keeping people out of your computer (I have tested it against a couple of test sites) but it does not have some of the features that other firewalls have. It does not keep a log of every connection attempt and it does not keep track of programs attempting to send out info from your computer.

For the most part I think it is all that is really needed for the average home user. So this could be a nice solution if you are planning to upgrade when XP is released or if you are going to buy a new computer soon.

Dimone

I think those are the reasons one technology column writer disconnected his XP computer from the net, or he switched OS. I got that very recently from Yahoo technology, or ZDnet. Perhaps home PC owners should download the free Zone Alarm quick before it go out of business.

Now I got it. From my experience from installing zone alarm in a PC connected to a LAN, you got overwhelmed because hundreds of things want to get access in and out of your computer that you don't know about. If XP is just as strict as ZA, no system admin will allow XP in his LAN. The cable technical support guys will probably want to shoot Bill.

You may want to make sure your computer is adequately protected. Please see the following article for more information. Here is an excerpt:

---

quote:

Experts Anxious Over Possible Net Attack
Thu Jul 31, 8:57 AM ET
By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer

WASHINGTON - Government and industry experts are increasingly concerned about brewing hacker activity they consider a precursor to a broad Internet attack that will target a serious flaw in Windows software from Microsoft Corp.

Experts are advising computer users with renewed urgency to apply a free repairing patch that Microsoft has offered on its Web site since July 16, when it acknowledged that the flaw affected nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software.

---

A very good free firewall is zonealarm.

www.zonealarm.com